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Evernote for Beginners: Email to Evernote

How to Adapt to Change

If you ever found yourself thinking “Email directly to Evernote? Why, that’s a service I would pay for!” Well, now you can. Pay that is. And perhaps you should.

Just as a preface, I’m not affiliated with Evernote. I receive no compensation or benefits directly from the company apart from my paid subscription. I’m just a happy, long-time, paying customer. If anything I say sounds like a defense of Evernote, it is more a statement in defense of businesses, in general, that have the right to charge for a product.

Change can be uncomfortable for customers too.

Email to Evernote had previously been a free-to-use feature. In fact, almost everything Evernote was a free-to-use feature. There were very few compelling “I’ve got to have that” features available in the one-and-only paid plan. Despite that, after a year, I found some usefulness in the premium features and I also wanted to support a company that was supporting me. So I became a premium user.

I think of it like being on a eight year trial plan. Companies typically only give you only a month to use features for free. Evernote gave eight years! That’s quite a deal.

The Plus plan, as of this writing, is only $2.99/mo or $24.99 if paying for a year up front (working out to be $2.08/mo). If you depend on Evernote, and it (specifically the email feature) is integrated into your life, business, and workflows, then I believe it is worth the cost.

Just as a comparison, Spotify charges $9.99/mo for a premium plan so you can rent music. I love music. But I choose first to spend my money on what I have found valuable in achieving my goals. It’s not necessarily a matter of right or wrong at that point. It’s just a matter of values.

As far as using the email to Evernote feature, it is actually very simple.

You get your own email address (like MrCool12397@m.evernote.com) associated with your account.

You can send any email (or have emails directed) to that email address.

Evernote creates a new note from the email.

You can get very fancy with it – adding it to workflows, typing special characters in the subject to designate tags, notebooks, and reminders. Those are all advanced features that I won’t go over since this is “A Beginner’s Guide to Evernote.” For more specifics about using the Email to Evernote feature, see Evernote’s article How to save email into Evernote.

However, I do want to share a couple alternatives to this feature for the free users. These are not perfect replacements for the feature, but they may work for the casual user.

Option 1: Gmail + Web Clipper

This is my recommended solution. It may work with other online email platforms, but I specifically tested with Gmail and confirmed it works.

It creates a nice looking note that captures the email perfectly. This was actually faster and cleaner than sending an email to my Evernote address.

Option 2: IFTTT + Evernote

This solution is more advanced and I didn’t find it particularly useful, but I did test it to determine if it was an option. You’ll need (1) an IFTTT account with (2) both your email account (Gmail or Outlook Office 365) and Evernote account registered as a “Channel”.

The formatting looks good for Office 365 email, but your only options are (1) all new email, (2) email from a specific contact, or (3) email marked as important. Gmail has some other options available (starred or labeled mail), but it only supports basic text formatting (it excludes any text that is html… which is most email text these days).

It’s possible…

You can influence a company like Evernote to change their mind about the feature. Customers have been very vocal, especially through Social Media, in getting companies to reconsider their recent changes. But if you choose to be vocal, I encourage you to be honest in a way that is positive and supportive – looking for solutions rather than complaining.

Question: Have you ever written to a company to get them to change something? You can leave a comment by clicking here.